It was meant to be a final farewell, a parting thought delivered in the closing edition of a weekly Internet of Things newsletter on Friday, August 18, 2023. After years of chronicling the rise of connected devices, smart homes, and the relentless march of consumer technology, the author found herself reflecting not on the brilliant new features promising to revolutionize our daily routines, but on the exhausting, unglamorous reality of keeping those very systems alive. The inspiration for this final mandate struck during a webinar held the previous Thursday, which focused on how journalists might leverage generative AI in their reporting. During the discussion, one of the panelists let out a heavy sigh, bemoaning the reluctance of newsroom developers to invest in building AI verification tools. The root of the hesitation was simple yet daunting: because the threat landscape of deepfakes and manipulated media is constantly evolving, any detection tool built today would require perpetual, tireless updates to remain effective. For anyone who has lived in the modern technological ecosystem, the sentiment was instantly and painfully relatable. For years, tech columnists, analysts, and everyday consumers alike have grumbled about the relentless maintenance required just to keep a smart home from devolving into a digital ghost town. It involves far more than clicking "update" on a software patch or rebooting a stubborn router. True tech maintenance means scrambling to rewrite home automation routines when a major third-party provider suddenly deprecates its application programming interfaces, or APIs. It means troubleshooting a broken digital workflow when a silent link between Zapier and an essential productivity service gets severed without warning. It even shows up in the jarring moments of minor disorientation experienced when getting into a car, only to discover that an over-the-air midnight software update from Tesla has completely rearranged the dashboard, moving critical driving information to a brand-new location. Living with modern technology increasingly means living in a perpetual state of flux. Instinctively, consumers and professionals alike understand this reality, yet operationally and mentally, society has utterly failed to adapt to the sheer velocity of constant change. Mentally acknowledging that a connected device holds long-term value precisely because its feature set can continuously expand via the cloud is one thing. Experiencing genuine frustration when a user interface suddenly shifts overnight, or discovering that a new automated "recipe" setting on a smart oven cooks the evening chicken dinner completely differently than it did last week, is entirely another. The human brain is simply not equipped to process and comfortably absorb constant, unyielding change across every single aspect of modern life. Consequently, the friction generated when everyday appliances and vehicles suddenly work differently feels jarring, stressful, and fundamentally exhausting. Businesses, meanwhile, have proven equally sluggish in adapting their internal operational philosophies to match the reality of software-driven entropy. Google serves as a textbook example of this cultural misalignment. Within the tech giant’s corporate structure, employees have historically been rewarded and promoted for creating entirely new tools, applications, and software suites. If an ambitious engineer wants to get ahead, the unwritten rule is clear: you must invent. This creates a pervasive corporate culture where workers are heavily incentivized to chase shiny new innovations rather than nurture and maintain what already exists. For the end user, the real-world consequence of this innovation-first mindset is that favorite tools and beloved applications are left in a constant state of quiet decay. When third-party partners make underlying changes, companies driven purely by creation metrics often fail to react quickly enough to prevent user frustration. This dangerous cultural divide between creation and upkeep is not confined to Silicon Valley boardrooms; it is bleeding directly into traditional industries as well. In industrial settings, a classic culture clash frequently plays out between corporate IT staff and the operational technology, or OT, engineers running physical manufacturing plants. IT professionals often accuse plant engineers of fostering a culture of refusal, criticizing them for pushing back against new automations or resisting the introduction of cutting-edge technology into well-established factory workflows. Yet, the hesitation of operations staff is deeply rooted in practical wisdom. OT engineers possess a decades-long history of building and managing industrial processes that are fundamentally consistent, predictable, and knowable. Injecting enterprise IT into these tightly controlled environments introduces immediate entropy and demands entirely new layers of complex maintenance procedures—maintenance that fast-moving IT departments sometimes balk at supporting once the initial deployment hype fades. While the industrial operations side has spent generations cultivating a deep corporate respect for maintenance and continuity, the modern information technology sector has stubbornly refused to do the same. As computing hardware and smart software become invisibly embedded into more physical devices and critical business processes, this oversight has become unsustainable. Software decays, and in the modern digital ecosystem, it decays with startling rapidity. The inevitable decay of software will continue to exert an increasingly heavy toll on day-to-day human life. To counter this, organizations must fundamentally reform their internal incentives, pushing developers and product managers to value ongoing maintenance just as deeply as they value initial creation. Companies must intentionally carve out protected time within the standard work week for employees to adjust to shifting user interfaces, learn updated software ecosystems, and adapt to changing digital services. Furthermore, businesses must officially recognize this adjustment period as legitimate, productive work rather than treating it as lost downtime. Much like certified professionals in fields such as law and medicine are legally and ethically required to pursue continuing education credits to maintain their licenses, any modern profession that regularly interacts with complex technology—which will soon include virtually every job on the market—needs a parallel cultural ethos. Workplaces must both incentivize and actively support employees as they struggle to adapt to an environment of continuous technological change, including the massive disruptions and advancements posed by artificial intelligence. Building this resilient workforce cannot rest entirely on the shoulders of individual employees, forcing them to constantly muster up personal energy and enthusiasm out of sheer willpower. Maintaining digital services and adapting to shifting software landscapes will soon establish itself as a measurable economic value, and it must be treated and compensated as such by leadership. On the consumer front, this economic shift may ultimately reshape how everyday products are bought and sold. It could mean a transition away from traditional one-time hardware purchases toward ongoing subscription models, ensuring that the corporate entities behind smart products continue to receive the steady revenue needed to fund ongoing developer costs and long-term software maintenance. Alternatively, it may force manufacturers to sell products with explicitly defined expiration dates, clearly communicating the exact timeframe during which the company promises to actively maintain the device before letting it gracefully fade into obsolescence. If society truly wishes to infuse everyday products with ambient intelligence and digital connectivity, the focus cannot remain exclusively on flash-in-the-pan features and disruptive innovation. A holistic approach must be taken to consider how those products will be maintained over their lifecycles, and how that essential maintenance will be sustainably funded. As computing power drives software and digital services deeper into professional workflows, and as modern jobs increasingly demand the agility to embrace rapid innovation, businesses must invest heavily in maintaining the digital literacy and adaptability of their human workforce. Constant, unyielding innovation is inherently exhausting. Because that innovation is predominantly anchored in software, it remains uniquely prone to rapid entropy and structural decay. Society must learn to genuinely value the dedicated people and the valuable time required to push back against that entropy, all while ensuring that both workers and consumers are granted the necessary grace and space to adapt to a world permanently caught in motion. And with those final thoughts delivered, it is time to turn toward the horizon and prepare to make a few necessary changes of one’s own. Post navigation IoT Pioneer Stacey Higginbotham Steps Back After Two Decades of Tech Journalism